In praise of walls

February 9, 2019

There is much rhetoric about walls these days. Usually about walls at the boundaries of nations.

But the concept of walls (along with fire and the wheel and all that they enabled) was one of the critical developments which enabled humans to differentiate themselves from all other species and enabled human civilisation to develop. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that without walls –  first around shelters and then around dwellings, settlements, places of work, and eventually around whole cities and at nation boundaries – civilisation itself would not have been possible. Human civilisation would have been still-born without the ability to create safe, protected enclosures within which to live (and work) defying the elements and any external threats. In fact, walls are integral and necessary to our lives today. We could not live without walls.

Humans control the environment they live and work in. This ability is what allows us to live anywhere in the world irrespective of the prevailing environment. From blistering deserts to the frigid reaches of Antarctica, it is walls which enable roofs and which together allow us to create volumes of controlled environments for ourselves. We not only live within walls, we travel in walled containers which provide enclosed volumes of controlled environments. Our carts, our cars our trains and boats and planes all rely on walls to create our enclosures. The walls in my home are what give me my controlled environment and my security and my sense of security.

It was always thought that cave dwelling probably preceded the building of huts and dwellings. But modern humans appeared first in areas where caves were not so numerous and primitive walls probably appeared to protect small groups spending the night on open ground. There is some suggestion that some kind of walled shelters were used by homo erectus – perhaps 500,000 years ago. (Homo erectus had the controlled use of fire as early as 1.5 million years ago). It is not implausible that the earliest walls were fences built to protect an area around a camp-fire.

BBC: Japanese archaeologists have uncovered the remains of what is believed to be the world’s oldest artificial structure, on a hillside at Chichibu, north of Tokyo. 
The shelter would have been built by an ancient ancestor of humans, Homo erectus, who is known to have used stone tools. The site has been dated to half a million years ago, according to a report in New Scientist. It consists of what appear to be 10 post holes, forming two irregular pentagons which may be the remains of two huts. Thirty stone tools were also found scattered around the site. …… Before the discovery, the oldest remains of a structure were those at Terra Amata in France, from around 200,000 to 400,000 years ago. ……. 

John Rick, an anthropologist at Stanford University, says that if the find is confirmed it will be interesting because it shows that hominids could conceive of using technology to organise things. “They had the idea of actually making a structure, a place where you might sleep. It represents a conceptual division between inside and outside.” 

There is little doubt that while city walls are at most 15-20,000 years old, even hunter gatherers from 100,000 years ago were no strangers to walls. Even those who used caves in temperate zones probably only used caves as winter quarters. In summers they would have used lightweight, temporary walls.

Aerial view of part of the Great Wall

The idea of a safe, protected, enclosure lies deep in the human psyche. Walls are existential. What would we be without our houses, buildings, dams, sea-walls, siege walls, curtain walls, walls around fields, walled enclosures, prisons or walls at nation boundaries? Walls between nations are at least 5,000 years old and probably predate even the definition of nation sates.

The EU has built 1,000km of border walls since fall of Berlin Wall

European Union states have built over 1,000km of border walls since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a new study into Fortress Europe has found.  ……  the EU has gone from just two walls in the 1990s to 15 by 2017. ……. Despite celebrations this year that the Berlin Wall had now been down for longer than it was ever up, Europe has now completed the equivalent length of six Berlin walls during the same period. 

  1. Walls work.
  2. Humans need walls.

 

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In Sweden, abortion has become just another form of contraception

February 7, 2019

I am still old-fashioned enough to believe that abortion is a necessary, last-resort procedure to be used only if the life of the mother is at risk or if the fetus is nonviable. But it seems to be becoming just another form of contraception, and in a few cases, the method of preferred contraception.

Just a quirk of the numbers but the proportion being aborted today are about the same proportion as infant mortality claimed some 300 years ago. Globally the number of abortions is about 25-30% of the number of live births. In Sweden it is just over 30%.

  • In the 1700s infant mortality killed about 20% of children under 1 year old.
  • Today the infant mortality rate is less than 0.3%
  • Today around 30/130 = 23% are aborted.

Swedish Radio (Ekot) carried this report today:

Better counseling can reduce repeated abortions

Repeated abortions can be prevented if abortion clinics improve their contraceptive counseling, according to a new study.

Siri, who has gone through several abortions, thinks that counseling in connection with abortion is important. “You feel immediate shame and guilt because your pregnancy is unplanned. Then it is about being treated with empathy and respect in a longer meeting. Perhaps the contraceptive advice should not be just 15 -20 minutes.”The mother of two, Siri, has undergone unplanned pregnancy several times, and has found it difficult to find a suitable contraceptive..

This is a recurring theme in the doctoral thesis that midwife Helena Kilander from the Höglandssjukhuset in Eksjö has completed at Linköping University.

She followed 987 women who had abortions in 2009. A quarter of the women came back to make a new abortion within a couple of years. Many of them had received birth control pills, but did not take the tablets.

…………. Every day, almost 100 women in Sweden have abortions. And it is more common here, than in the other Nordic countries, that women have repeated abortions. “Although there are few negative long-term effects of undergoing abortion, it is common for this to be a stressful event in women’s life”.

………

By the numbers:

  • SCB: 110 – 115,000 babies are born in Sweden every year. (In 2016 it was higher than usual at about 117,000).
  • Around 36,000 abortions are carried out every year.
  • 25% of those surveyed had repeat abortions.
  • Some women have multiple (4 – 5) abortions.

Paradoxically, what used to be the duty to use abortion as a last resort to preserve the life of the mother has been “liberalized” into a woman’s absolute “right” to kill her own unborn children.

 

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Where murderers can’t be executed but new born babies can ….

February 1, 2019

In New York, capital punishment is not allowed and murderers cannot be executed. But new born babies can be killed after-birth whenever an abortion could have been justified. And to have an abortion is apparently always justified.

It would seem that the moral justification of abortion on demand and for convenience, is now being extended to include infanticide by rebranding it as “after-birth abortions”.

In New York hospitals, you can find premature newborn babies surrounded by dedicated doctors and nurses fighting to save their lives. Next door, you now might find physicians and non-physicians alike giving lethal injections to babies the same age, thanks to the state’s new so-called Reproductive Health Act.

Over a decade ago, New York abolished the death penalty for convicted criminals, but as of last week, babies in the seventh, eighth and ninth month of their mother’s pregnancy — old enough to live outside their mother’s wombs — can now be given lethal injections.

Abortions at that stage are committed by piercing the baby’s brain or heart with a large needle and injecting her with enough digoxin to cause cardiac arrest. Labor is then induced, and the mother delivers her dead child into the hands of an abortionist.

Abortion-rights advocates say that late-term abortions are only performed in cases where a mother’s life or health is at risk or the child suffers from a life-threatening condition.

But this is false. According to research published by the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, abortions for fetal abnormalities “make up a small minority” of late-term abortions; those for saving the mother’s life are an even smaller number. The majority of late-term abortions aren’t done for so-called “medical reasons” at all.

The academic community started the use of the euphemistic “after birth abortion”. The moral justification for infanticide that is now being developed by the “progressive” community is remarkably similar to the moral justification for race based eugenics developed in the 1930s. And – irony of ironies – such arguments are actually developed and disseminated in a journal calling itself The Journal of Medical Ethics. (a main stream, peer reviewed Springer publication)

“After birth abortion”

 

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“Dangerous lack of academic qualifications in top Swedish politicians”

January 25, 2019

The “knowledge society” is the catchphrase. But in Sweden it is administered by career politicians without academic qualifications of any significance.

As an opinion piece in the SvD points out:

Even the new Löfven government  thinks that politically groomed ministers without any special academic background or insight into the conditions of research should lead Sweden into the “knowledge society”. One can no longer imagine a Swedish prime minister with a doctoral degree or an education minister with a professorship ……

Science is and remains the largest and most important knowledge generator in society. One might therefore think that the ministers and other politicians who will lead us into the “knowledge society” – a mantra repeated by the new Löfven government – would themselves possess especially high academic competence and particular insight into the conditions of the search for scientific knowledge.

However, nothing could be more wrong.

Nor is the new government Löfven more familiar with knowledge acquisition than other groupings. One may be glad that the newly appointed Minister for Higher Education and Research has read more than a few extra courses and that the Minister of Justice, who is also responsible for migration issues, has at least a Bachelor’s degree. In law? No, in political science.

We can compare this with the German government, where Merkel himself is a PhD physicist and the former Minister of Education was a professor of mathematics. Almost all ministers in the new German government have an academic degree, of which six are PhDs.

………..Unfortunately, there are no clear signs that the new  Löfven government will be able to even identify the underlying system errors, let alone take measures and steps to actually fix them.

The talk about Sweden as a knowledge nation will therefore also in the future be in ironic contrast to the political reality.

 

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Living in time

January 24, 2019

Most fish are probably unaware that the water they are living in is a bounded environment. I write “most” because flying fish must have some notion of the surface and are able to break through it for short periods and small distances. Similarly, bottom-dwelling fish must have some notion of the boundary they burrow into, and all fish must have some notion of coastal or river boundaries. Nevertheless, we can conceive of fish completely surrounded and dominated and constrained by the watery environment they live in. They are completely powerless to change that environment.

And so it is with humans and time. The difference is that we perceive no boundaries to our time environment. Like fish in a river, we perceive only one direction for the flow. Unlike fish, we perceive no local eddies or reversals of the flow of time. Unlike salmon we cannot conceive of moving against the current. We perceive only a smooth, steady, implacable uni-directional flow.

We have no idea of the structure or the nature of time. The flow we perceive may just be a consequence of our language. We have no idea why the perceived flow should be steady. Could there be a condition where no flow occurs? Or where the flow is a different rate or in some other direction? Or even whether the flow itself is just illusion and does not exist at all. We are used to thinking of many futures but only one past. There is speculation of multiverses where every possible future exists. Why only one present?

From what I have read by physicist Carlo Rovelli (“the new Stephen Hawking”), he takes the view that time is an emergent property and the flow of time we perceive is an illusion. Past, present and future are all emergent. His book “The Order of Time” has received wonderful reviews even from those who do not agree with his views.

It is time to read his book and see if it stops me from staying awake at night trying to imagine many pasts and only one future.

 

Related:

The magical speed of an inconstant time

Idle thoughts: On time and change and states of stasis

Time precedes existence

 

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Philosophy before physics

January 23, 2019

Stephen Hawking once said “Philosophy is dead”.

Speaking to Google’s Zeitgeist Conference in Hertfordshire, the author of ‘A Brief History of Time’ said that fundamental questions about the nature of the universe could not be resolved without hard data such as that currently being derived from the Large Hadron Collider and space research. “Most of us don’t worry about these questions most of the time. But almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead,” he said. “Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.”

But claiming that philosophy is dead is itself philosophy.

Hawking’s comment is remarkably like that of Isocrates who some 2,300 years ago followed the sophists. He taught rhetoric and oratory and did not much care for Plato’s new-fangled approach to thinking and education or his definition of philosophy. Isocrates certainly did not like Plato’s attacks on his school.

“Those who do philosophy, who determine the proofs and the arguments … and are accustomed to enquiring, but take part in none of their practical functions, … even if they happen to be capable of handling something, they automatically do it worse, whereas those who have no knowledge of the arguments [of philosophy], if they are trained [in concrete sciences] and have correct opinions, are altogether superior for all practical purposes. Hence for sciences, philosophy is entirely useless.”

Plato (428BCE – 348BCE)

But Plato prevailed even if he did make use of “fake news”.

Because of Plato’s attacks on the sophists, Isocrates’ school — having its roots, if not the entirety of its mission, in rhetoric, the domain of the sophists — came to be viewed as unethical and deceitful. Yet many of Plato’s criticisms are hard to substantiate in the actual work of Isocrates; at the end of Phaedrus, Plato even shows Socrates praising Isocrates (though some scholars have taken this to be sarcasm).

Part of the issue is semantics. Philosophical thinking by a physicist remains philosophy. (And observations and reasoning by philosophers would still be physics).

One cannot even begin to undertake the process called science without a philosophy. One can make observations and report them as perceptions but whether the perceived observations are valid or not are a matter of philosophy. Linking observations – or perceptions of observations – requires a philosophic acceptance of causality. Causality itself requires an acceptance of the flow of time which remains a philosophic question even when asked by a physicist. The languages used in describing observations (including mathematics) and in reasoning itself are underpinned by a philosophy of language. Even the simplest of observations requires the observer to have an underlying philosophy, just to be perceived as a relevant and valid observation. Communicating such observations are even more dependent upon the existence of language having a philosophy.

As Carlo Rovelli writes:

Here is a second argument due to Aristotle: Those who deny the utility of philosophy, are doing philosophy. The point is less trivial than it may sound at first. Weinberg and Hawking have obtained important scientific results. In doing this, they were doing science. In writing things like “philosophy is useless to physics,” or “philosophy is dead,” they were not doing physics. They were reflecting on the best way to develop science. The issue is the methodology of science: a central concern in the philosophy of science is to ask how science is done and how it could be done to be more effective. ….. They express a certain idea about the methodology of science. Is this the eternal truth about how science has always worked and should work? Is it the best understanding of science we have at present? It is neither. In fact, it is not difficult to trace the origins of their ideas. They arise from the background of logical positivism, corrected by Popper and Kuhn. The current dominant methodological ideology in theoretical physics relies on their notions of falsifiability and scientific revolution, which are popular among theoretical physicists; they are often referred to, and are used to orient research and evaluate scientific work.

….. They express a certain idea about the methodology of science. Is this the eternal truth about how science has always worked and should work? Is it the best understanding of science we have at present?

It is neither. In fact, it is not difficult to trace the origins of their ideas. They arise from the background of logical positivism, corrected by Popper and Kuhn. The current dominant methodological ideology in theoretical physics relies on their notions of falsifiability and scientific revolution, which are popular among theoretical physicists; they are often referred to, and are used to orient research and evaluate scientific work.

All of human thought builds on implied philosophies; on assumptions of reality and observations and on implicit philosophies embedded in the logic of our languages. There is no branch of science which does not need fundamental assumptions which are taken as being axiomatic. There is no branch of science which does not have fundamental “rules”. It is only the explicit questioning of the underlying assumptions which we label “philosophy”.  But the philosophies exist whether the assumptions are questioned or not. Physics of any kind is not possible without an underpinning philosophy of physics.

Philosophy is integral to science and to physics. There can never be a fundamental assumption made without there first being a philosophy.

And, of course, philosophy precedes physics in the dictionary.

Carlo Rovelli: Physics Needs Philosophy / Philosophy Needs Physics

 

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Rage against the dying of another light

January 22, 2019

Per-Erik Störe (1959 -2019)

A good man died yesterday.

He was a friend and would have been 60 next week.

I first met him only 9 years ago but admired his mind, his energy, his initiative, his inspiration and his friendliness. I am privileged and glad and thankful to have had him as a friend.

Of course I know that globally some 150,000 others also died yesterday. And that some 350,000 babies were born yesterday. I understand Dylan Thomas that much better now, as the regret and sorrow that he will no longer touch and inspire those around him, turns into a kind of anger. And along with Dylan Thomas, I rage against the dying of another consciousness, where all Pelle experienced and remembered and had learned and knew is lost forever.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night. 
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray 
Do not go gentle into that good night. 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But I am very thankful I knew him and I can call him a friend.

 

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When the encyclopedia in your pocket is wired into your brain

January 20, 2019

All human knowledge is not, yet, available on the web. All the knowledge which is available on the web is not, yet, available to each of us. But all that is available on the web is already available to each of us who has a connected smart phone in a pocket. With every connected smart phone there is an encyclopedia in a pocket.

But using such an encyclopedia is not, yet, instantaneous. It is not yet a part of your brain. It is not just the choice of browser or search engine (e.g. Google) or the repository (e.g.Wikipedia). You still have to search the web. You still have to ask the right question. You still have to discard the advertisements and the fake news and select the relevant information. It takes a little time. By the time you find the right answer the conversation may have moved on to another topic, such that presenting the information you found in your pocket may be embarrassingly irrelevant.

Nevertheless, everyone with a connected smart phone now has an encyclopedia in their pocket. And, I would guess, this encyclopedia will be implanted and connected to the brain within the next 50 years.

We are already in the age of implants.

Currently, implants are being used in many different parts of the body for various applications such as orthopaedics, pacemakers, cardiovascular stents, defibrillators, neural prosthetics or as drug delivery systems. Concurrent with the increased life span in today’s world, the number of age-related diseases has also increased. Hence, the need for new treatments, implants, prostheses and long-term pharmaceutical usage as well as the need for prolonging the life span of the current techniques has increased. 

Implants where thoughts can be used to control computers are already with us. Brain-computer interfaces (BCI’s) which were first thought of in the 1970s are now with us to stay.

image from Frontiersin.org

When drone warfare emerged, pilots could, for the first time, sit in an office in the U.S. and drop bombs in the Middle East. Now, one pilot can do it all, just using their mind — no hands required.

Earlier this month, DARPA, the military’s research division, unveiled a project that it had been working on since 2015: technology that grants one person the ability to pilot multiple planes and drones with their mind.

“As of today, signals from the brain can be used to command and control … not just one aircraft but three simultaneous types of aircraft,” Justin Sanchez, director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, said, according to Defense One.

….. Back in 2016, a volunteer equipped with a brain-computer interface (BCI) was able to pilot an aircraft in a flight simulator while keeping two other planes in formation — all using just his thoughts, ….. In 2017, Copeland was able to steer a plane through another simulation, this time receiving haptic feedback — if the plane needed to be steered in a certain direction, Copeland’s neural implant would create a tingling sensation in his hands.

We cannot yet, at will, without noticeable delay, mentally call for and access some particular information from the entire store of human knowledge.  But it is no longer science fiction to imagine people with an implant which has all the abilities of a mobile, smart phone. It will be an implant where the input/output interface would no longer require the use of fingers or the reading of a physical screen. Your thoughts (and perhaps also sub-vocalisations) would be sufficient to trigger the appropriate questions to the web. The answers would be projected onto your eyes or enter your brain subliminally. Humans would have to become far more practiced not only at distinguishing between interfacing with the external world and internally connecting with the web, but also with mental multi-tasking in a way never required before.

Maybe not in 10 years but surely within 50.

 

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Killing humans is usually immoral

January 18, 2019

Morality is relative.

It varies over time and space.

There have always been situations where killing of some humans has been considered, not just not immoral, but actually a moral duty. To kill people of opposing faiths was justifiable for a long time. To put enemies or sufficiently “bad” people to death was once a moral duty. Even something to be proud of.

It is no different today.

For ISIS and other “terrorist” organisations killing the enemy in particularly brutal ways is something which is not only something to be proud of but also something which opens the gates to Paradise. Armies are trained to, and assessed, by their ability to kill the enemy – in bulk. Collateral damage is regrettable but allowed. It is never immoral. Many states allow individuals to kill when their own survival is threatened. Many other states do not. Many states exercise capital punishment for really “bad” people. Many other states do not and many of these mollycoddle the cancerous humans among them. In more “liberal” quarters the number of euthanasia deaths and abortions carried out have become something to be proud of. Paradoxically, the states which are most opposed to capital punishment are also the states which are most in favour of abortion and the “mercy” killings of the aged or the terminally ill.

There is no such thing as a “human right” to life. Any individual’s life is “cabined, cribbed, confined” by his genes, the privileges accorded by the surrounding society and the quirks of random events.

As with all so-called “human rights”  living is just another privilege.

 

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Abortion now a significant demographic parameter

January 15, 2019

During 2018, it is estimated that around 140 million babies were born and that around 60 million people died. The global population had reached 7.7 billion at the end of 2018.

In addition, around 41 million legal abortions were carried out in 2018. There may also be a significant number of illegal or unreported abortions so that the total number may be around 50 million.

Global fertility rates are declining inexorably. The number of babies born will be reducing over the next 100 years (with the biggest declines expected in Africa). The crude death rate is a balance between two trends; first the decline due to improving health care (and longevity) and second the increase due to an increasing population of the aged. By around 2090 deaths will exceed births and by 2100 the world population will be in decline.

Abortions are not recorded in either birth or death statistics. But what is not in doubt is that the actual number of babies born is almost 30% lower because of abortions. If abortions were included in both birth and death statistics the natural population increase (births minus deaths) would remain unchanged (190m-110m instead of 140m-60m). However, abortions would then be the single highest cause of death. The next highest cause of death would then be coronary artery disease (around 10m).

The long term, global, fertility and morbidity trends are not affected by the number of abortions. Even if no abortions took place, world population would still stabilise and then decline but this would be delayed by about 40 years (stabilisation and decline in 2130 instead of about 2090).

That abortion is now a significant demographic parameter is self-evident.

The morality or rightness of carrying out abortions is a different matter and primarily for women to decide on. The human species is the only one which has the ability to, and does, carry out intentional abortions. That women should be assisted to carry out abortions to preserve their health or for other necessary medical reasons (physical or mental) seems obvious.

I am not so sure that assisting abortions for the convenience of the mother or for covering up carelessness is equally justified. Or that 41 million legal abortions is a number to celebrate or to be particularly proud of.

 

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